**Disputes, conflicts are not inherently harmful or bad. It could lead to productive growth, if participants able to devise mutually acceptable ways to work together to resolve issues. Trust need to be there.** ^ee1503 #trust #conflict #mediation Source [[The Mediation Process 4th ed by Christopher W Moore]] All interpersonal relationships, communities, organizations, societies, and nations experience disputes or conflicts at one time or another. Conflict and disputes exist when people or groups engage in competition to achieve goals that they perceive to be, or that actually are, incompatible. Conflict is not necessarily bad, abnormal, or dysfunctional; it is a fact of life. But when it goes beyond competitive behavior and acquires the additional purpose of inflicting serious physical or psychological damage on another person or group, it is then that the negative and harmful dynamics of conflict exact their full costs. ==Conflicts and disputes do not inherently have to follow a destructive course; they can lead to growth and be productive for those who are involved. Whether this happens or not often depends on the participants' ability to devise mutually acceptable procedures for cooperative problem solving, their capacity to lay aside distrust and animosity while they work together to resolve differences, and on their ability to develop solutions that satisfactorily meet their individual and common needs and interests. Many people in conflict are unable to do this on their own. They often need the help of a third party, an individual or group of people who are not directly involved in the conflict, to assist then to reach mutually acceptable solutions== Mediation, one form of third-party assistance, has long been used to help disputants voluntarily settle their differences. It has been effectively practiced in almost all periods of history, in most cultures, and used to resolve a wide variety of types of disputes. Until relatively recently, however, there have been few works that detail what mediators actually do to aid people in conflict to reach agreements.* - Reminded me of [[Trust is the coin of the realm]]